Wednesday, October 03, 2012

rams and yowes (multi-coloured)

This is a Kate Davies pattern, if that means nothing to you find out about her at http://katedaviesdesigns.com/ - she designs the most beautiful knitted items. They are, apart from the fantastic designs, a joy to knit as they are so well laid out and easy to follow. When I saw rams and yowes I knew I had to make it.

I'd already made 'sheep heid' in (for me) record time. I did this in the natural Shetland colours from Jamieson & Smith the pattern was written for. For 'rams and yowes' I decided to use those up, and a lot of the many, many 'left over from other projects' balls of colourful Rowan (Yorkshire Tweed, Rowanspun etc. etc.), Jamieson & Smith and Hanne Falkenberg wool I seem to have accumulated. All these are 100% wool and, I felt, were still appropriate for the pattern.

I spent a good few hours arranging balls of yarn together on the floor, and then a few more going cross-eyed in front of Excel spread sheets to get the colours to (sort of, I later discovered) work together, and came up with my plan.

This is the result:

I did all my rams in natural Shetland colours, my yowes decided they wanted to be colourful ladies, so how could I deny them.

I tried to pick up the colours in the sheepy part of the blanket in the border, to tie it all together (however this meant I lost the gradual shading from dark to light in Kate's original design)...

...and picked up the pale purple again in the centre (some of my decisions were based on how much of which colour I had in my stash!). I'm not sure this grey/brown combo really shows off the second row of rams as much as I'd have liked.

It's also a bit crinkly round the border, which I believe I could fix by going down a needle size the next time I knit it - because I do think I need another one.

Here are the yowes again. All the time I was knitting it they reminded me of the 'Mo'hairs'* in Margaret Attwood's 'Year of the Flood'.

*multicoloured sheep used for growing replacement hair. You should read the book.